In the past few days I have been contacting various Italian telephone system installers on the subject of the Open Days my company is organizing.

Among the usual complaints, both true and false, I happened to hear:

‘You know, Mr. Nicolai, evaluating a new brand, starting a new partnership is an investment, it is important to invest time, money, resources…’

This is all correct, up to this point!
But then I hear mouthed off:

‘But it is not the right time!’ And then: ‘There is an economic crisis, there is no money, the market is going down and so on… and so on…’

It is at these times that I remember a video by Frank Merenda where, among the usual customer complaints, he stated:

“…his grandmother broke her leg;

his cat was boiled in the pressure cooker by mistake and he must go to the funeral and will therefore be in mourning for at least six months…;

locusts and grasshoppers have invaded his warehouse!”

What type of exits do these gentlemen see?

A Panasonic telephone system installer from Bergamo boasts of having various customers he has not heard from for many years, and he believes it to be his merit, since to his opinion, it means that the stuff installed by him still works…

But he has never asked himself a few questions:

• Those customers who have been using that stuff for years, do they not want to change it for something more advanced?
• Maybe he has already lost them or he is about to lose them for that very reason, and maybe they do not even remember he exists?

No, he has not even thought of this scenario, who knows why…

Another installer from Turin was telling me that the only route is to not acquire new customers (how wrong!), but to save the existing ones from the competition, without having though clear ideas on how to go about this.

• By constructing perhaps a ‘Turin Wall’ inspired by the Berlin Wall?
• Proposing something different? Noooo, it’s not really the best time!

What can I say, for these people the moment to make an investment may never come, for them there is always an excuse, a justification to NOT do things, the strongest of these excuses, ‘this is how we have always done things!’

This has led to the failure of many companies of the most varied industries (here I can think of the perfect example of the large scale retail trade company I worked for in the past…)

Any forecasts?

Sincerely I dare not make any, I would like to examine these people in depth, I do not surrender before their trivial complaints.

Many of these will close down soon, there is no alternative to extinction for them. Their world, the way in which they’ve been used to make their living, no longer exists.

At the same time, when I have the chance to speak to someone like this, I always remember the words of Giacomo Brusciati, owner of the company Comunica.Meta in Fano (in the Pesaro and Urbino province):

Those who do not change are destined to fail!

It is useless to stay still and wait for ‘the right time’, because it has already arrived,  says Cristiano Bellumat, my commercial director.

It must be done here and now!